Consultant To Explore Regional `Wish List'

Partnership To Pay $100,000 On Effort

HAMPTON — Rick Horrow helped Oklahoma City craft a plan for developing nine buildings for sports, arts and recreation and putting them before the public for one vote.

The project's cost to taxpayers: $250 million. Voters approved the idea four years ago.

Horrow also has worked on numerous stadium and arena projects across the country, in places like Jacksonville, Fla., Cincinnati and Nashville. And last year, the National Football League hired him to help keep its teams from moving to new cities.

Now Horrow has a new client: Hampton Roads.

The Hampton Roads Partnership on Monday hired the Miami-based consultant to explore whether the region should come up with its own "wish list" of projects like Oklahoma City's that would be paid for with a combination of public and private money.

The Partnership will spend up to $100,000 on the effort over the next year. The region won't end up with a list of projects to put before voters at the end of the 12 months, said Barry DuVal, president of the group, which consists of public- and private-sector leaders. Instead, Hampton Roads leaders will decide whether to keep pursuing the idea. The $100,000 could come from money the region expects to receive under the new Regional Competitiveness Act.

Building a major-league sports arena was a hot topic this year when the region competed for a National Hockey League franchise. However, when the NHL cut Hampton Roads from its expansion derby, serious talk of constructing an arena disappeared.

DuVal and other leaders stressed that Horrow's work will be much broader than the arena idea. The region will explore whether a number of projects - generally described as "infrastructure improvements" - would boost economic development, DuVal.

Oklahoma City built a new baseball park and a new arena, and also redeveloped its convention center, music hall, fairgrounds, downtown library and learning center. Horrow said hopes for creating a pro sports arena got the process moving; Oklahoma City is still in the running for an NHL expansion team.

In Hampton Roads, the yearlong process will give cities and counties time to have their say about what kinds of projects they consider worthy of their dollars, said John O. "Dubby" Wynne, a co-chairman of the Partnership.

"There's a question about needs and priorities that is going to have to be sorted out in all this," Wynne said. "This is not about, do we want to do it because we can do it."

Horrow said he will have hundreds of meetings with city councils, county supervisors and other groups in the coming months to collect ideas about what the region wants. His contract with the Partnership calls for him to visit Hampton Roads four or five times each month. He said he will also use those meetings to build the public's confidence in the process.

"The early stage is a listening and fact-gathering stage. It is certainly not a here's-what-we-ought-to-do stage," he said.

Horrow said he believes the "timing is right" for Hampton Roads to look into a facilities project. Nine cities have put public-private partnership plans on the ballot since November 1995, and each one passed, he said.

Horrow called Hampton Roads an "incredibly challenging" place to take on such an effort, but added that it's not a unique area: Oklahoma City's project involved seven municipalities in three counties.

Even though Hampton Roads has 15 localities to deal with, Horrow said the Partnership already provides a way for them to work together. He also views the region's size - nearly 1.5 million people - and demographics as pluses.

"The hardest thing to get these communities to understand is they're able to do these kinds of projects," Horrow said.